Goodnight My Heart, Goodbye

My mother was visiting this weekend, and when she read one of my posts, she asked, “What is the difference between blogging and journaling?”

(I do both.)

Temporarily at a loss for words, I said, “Blogging is public.” This being the most general distinction I could think of.

Incidentally, I also saw Julie & Julia this weekend, a movie about another blogger who also went to Amherst College (who got a book deal from her blog at the tender age of 30. Take that, ego!). This particular blogger, Julie, has a conversation partway through her blogging project with her husband in which he accuses her of acting narcissistic. “What is blogging,” she answers, “But me, me, me?”

I’m not sure if that was my intention, writing this, writing here. Maybe this is just a soapbox I couldn’t give myself any other way. I believe that when I set out I had something to say; I also believe that I wasn’t quite sure what that was. And sure – I’ve found myself in these posts. It may be that was the only point. I do hope, however, that it was interesting, or reassuring, or entertaining, to someone, somewhere. And not just because I was in your life to begin with. But that’s my fantasy – it doesn’t have to come true.

And now we confront the matter at hand. I’m not very good with goodbyes. I often wonder at this – why I don’t let people and things float in and out of my like so many dandelion seeds on a warm breeze. I hate it; it feels tragic, sad. And there are all different kinds of goodbyes. Temporary, permanent, cordial, warm, loving, icy. And – there is death. And this one – this one I am not used to.

I have – I had – a cat. Short sentence, right? It’s not a big word, like “daughter,” or “brother.” Just a small word. Cat. She died exactly one week ago – just this time of night, actually. It was a bizarre, fast accident. I took her to a friend’s apartment; the newness of it scared her; she became so frightened that her heart stopped beating. And like that, laying on one of my towels, with both of my hands in her fur, with my voice in her ear, she died. I had no idea that such a thing was possible until it had already happened and I was listening to my syncopated sobs in the car as we rushed to the vet. She was four, her name was Nutmeg, and she picked me – not the other way around.

She was black, striped with brown, and smaller than a can of soup when we met. She looked up at me, bit the end of my finger in what felt like a kiss, and we’ve been together ever since. Except now, of course.

Someone told me recently that love is letting someone take care of you. I didn’t think about it much at the time. But in the days after her death, I looked at all her things – her bed (which she loved, even though she had long outgrown it), her brush, her food, her bowls, her collar, her toys, everything – piled forlornly there. These were all things I bought for her out of the little money I had – with which I thought I was taking care of her. Sometimes, in this 95 degree weather, I thought love could be measured by four-pound bags of cat food and ten-pound bags of litter carried home. And Nutmeg never carried my food home. She never cooked me breakfast, fed me at three in the morning, brushed my hair, or cleaned up after my mess, all of which I frequently did for her. I thought I was the caretaker – but watching myself this past week, I’m not so sure.

Because this is me without her: I can’t walk into my apartment without bursting into tears. When I hear a sound, I turn around and expect to see her there. When she isn’t, I weep. I hate the quiet. I hate that I can write this post without having to look over a tail that is trying to get my attention.

I live alone. Alone alone, Jerry Maguire alone – but I didn’t feel like that until today. I never planned to live alone alone, and I don’t want to – yet here I am, in the quiet. It turns out that there is a huge difference between living alone with a cat and living alone with plants. Then again, it could be just me. If you’ve been reading, you’ve probably realized that there is almost nothing – nothing – that has not changed about my life in the past four years. There was only one constant: Nutmeg. I took her home from the pound about a month after graduating from college. We drove across the country together. We have lived together all the time that I have not been abroad. I do not live with a sibling or a parent or a husband or a child. My roommates have changed. My city has changed. My profession has changed. My religion has changed. And through all of that, she was the one line I could draw without picking up my pen. She, well, stuck by me. Nutmeg was my person. She was my someone. My life changed, but our relationship never did. She missed me when I wasn’t home, and every time my key went in the door she ran to me, mewling like I’d left her for a hundred years. Then she would trot back into the apartment and collapse dramatically on her favorite spot on the rug, and yowl until I dropped everything in my hands, knelt down, and hugged and kissed her.

There is something meaningful about a life witnessed and cared about. Something sweet, something mundanely astonishing. And pets do this. They make us feel like it matters whether or not we come home at night. They make us feel loved unconditionally. They make us feel that there is nothing we could do to make them stop loving us so desperately. (Not that we would. Just look at them.) They make us feel special and irreplaceable – our taste, our smell, is the wind in their sails – and it never gets old. They make us feel as though we complete a world – as though without us, the magic would drain out of  their lives. And for this, they receive our unbreakable love – a thing we bestow cautiously. They are, in a word, family. The best kind: loyal, cherished. They are not human, no – but to a person who truly loves her pet, this does not diminish the relationship at all.

So what does a poor human do when she is left by such a companion – not by choice, but by fate? As far as I can tell, there isn’t much of a salve for this sort of wound. It heals, eventually – sort of. It’s not like life is better this way, ever – just that the missing part starts to feel normal. And in the meantime, I guess, you walk a fine line. Yes, it hurts – it kills – to look up from your keyboard and see the lint roller covered in her hair, and to know that one of these days, you’re going to have to use it, and then you’ll never see the lint roller covered in black hair again.. Or to look at your rug and think this needs to be vacuumed, but then decide to put it off for another day, because once you vacuum it, the spot where she used to lie will be clean forever, and she will be that much more gone from your life. Or to find her toy that she chased into the corner by the laundry, pick it up, stare at it, and stuff it deep in the pile because you can neither look at it, nor throw it away. Or to think of how it felt when she rubbed her cheek on your cheek, and to know that the specificity of that memory, like the shape of her face and the silky rubber texture of her paws, will fade, and in time she will be more of a feeling than a set of particular images or sounds. But you think of these things, even though they hurt – because you have them. You still have them. And for the moment, having them, so vividly, so clearly, and so painfully that you know your life has had some little magic in it, is more important than being able to finish the dishes without crying.

Habiba.

New girl

So I haven’t really been writing. I know. There are reasons. Maybe good, maybe nonexistent. Please see post below.

There is much self-censoring that goes into being the new girl, if you are (charmingly?) neurotic like me. You’re in a new city doing new things and having new experiences with new people, so yeah – there’s a lot to say. But it’s not that simple. Maybe I’ll say the wrong thing about a new place. Maybe my gripes are petty. Maybe my observations are baseless. And so on. I have a whole mental file cabinet overflowing with reasons to not say whatever it was that seemed important until I sat down to write. So I have waited, and waited, and waited for something both interesting and wildly general to post. There is no such statement.

It occurred to me while riding the subway home this evening that, after a fashion, I write best, and most, about loneliness. I suppose that this comes as no surprise. A girl who grows up with three siblings and a gaggle of parent/grandparent-type figures isn’t built for single life, convert life, twentysomething life, life in a new city, or any combination of the aforementioned afflictions.

So yes, I admit it: life is somewhat lonely here. I feel oddly guilty about not having greater, or more, adventures on my own (and furthermore, admitting as much to you, whoever you are), but that was never really my style. I’m a friend person. A girlfriend-type. Whatever way you choose to put it, my best adventures are had with my near and dear. On my own, I mostly read and write. This keeps me perfectly happy, but it’s not very tempting fodder for my facebook friends.

And I guess this is what gets me about my newness. It’s not that there’s nothing happening; there is. There is lots happening. But it’s not very exciting, most of the time. I’m not romping around the most exquisite scenery having my mind blown by every single new acquaintance I have. Mostly, I slink into the backdrop of scene-y sheesha joints while other people tell each other fantastic stories, discuss common friends, or talk about business. Not having ever worked for a for-profit company, not knowing the right people, and not having adventured lately in South America or the subcontinent, I’m conversationally impaired.

My square-peg-round-hole problem isn’t unfamiliar. It’s the lot of the new girl, unless she is one of those rarely gifted people who makes friends out of anyone and everyone in five minutes. I am not this girl. I am the girl who hogs the sheesha even while she hates herself, because while she is smoking, there is no obligation to make conversation with her neighbors. I am the girl who looks pretty enough to exclaim over, but is a little too hippie-hijabi-student chic to be adopted by any of the female elders of the tribe. Worst of all, I am the girl who pays so much attention to her own misfittedness that she doesn’t pay a writer’s attention to the scene around her (that would require looking up, you understand). I am the girl who waits to be spoken to, waits to make friends, waits for school to start. Surely, this will solve all of my problems – because being (probably) the only hijabi (and almost certainly the only white one) in a class of 750 will make me feel right at home. No. Sweat.

Now I feel all kinds of better.

Still, as much as it is true that I am often the only white Muslim in a group, or the only Muslim in a group, it is not the sum of my demographics alone that makes me, well, different. There are other white Muslims (I’m related to one of them). And there are other hijabis and other law students and other everythings. I can’t just be stuck in a room with another convert and become besties with that person in an afternoon. It’s not that simple – thank God. There is a personal chemistry that makes relationships special and unique – and often renders whatever it was that made us feel out of place a moment ago irrelevant. Of course, the more worlds you place between two people, the harder it is to spin solace in the space between them. But it’s possible to grow up in the same house as someone and end up as strangers – common background doesn’t always translate to common ground.

Maybe that’s the confusing part. There isn’t exactly a predictive pattern to this. What has bonded me to those I have loved best is some constellation of shared ideas, shared experiences, care, respect, compassion, and admiration. Sometimes it is almost all shared ideas and almost no compassion. Sometimes it is lots of respect and no shared experience. But whatever the case is, it’s not something that any one outward thing predicts. Yes, I occasionally feel out of place when I notice that I’m the only white person in sight – but only if I’m not with friends. More often, I feel sore-thumbish in a throng of white people.

I have a love-hate relationship with the mystery of bonding, to tell you the truth. On the one hand, it makes my world a far more beautiful and varied place; I may love someone dearly, fiercely, and yet still be surprised by his/her differentness after five or more years. The inability to discover everything about my friends who have been raised in different countries, or in vastly different cultures than my own, is sweet – not bitter. But it does make finding these people difficult. How am I to know what to look for? I’m not even sure I know precisely what it was that made me me. Does every experience contribute equally? Does my year in Egypt weigh more or less than other years? And what about being a convert? Does the significance of this fade with time, or is it a constant – some part of my identity that is immutably important? I haven’t picked myself apart enough to know.

This time around I find myself lacking in pearls of wisdom. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m not particularly adept at being new – if there is such a skill. I tell myself that the trick is not to lose faith in the face of difficulty. Part of preciousness is rarity. Just because every place and person isn’t as magical as the last, doesn’t mean that I’m a social leper or anything. No one fits the same everywhere. And it is often what is difficult that shapes us into something we weren’t sure we could become.

‘Tween time

Tick. Tock.

Readers, welcome to May. Erm, almost-May. Almost-finals, almost-graduation, almost-summer. Almost life. Welcome to your almost-life, shining like a thousand diamonds just on the horizon. Trying to take your eyes away to tend to the task at hand? Good luck with that.

Here’s the issue with fantasies, plans, and the future: they loom there, teasing you, like a finger in your ear while you’re trying to sleep. It’s impossible. While the time ticks and ticks and ticks away, and whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, or were supposed to finish by last Tuesday, is sitting there gathering dust on your desktop, you are gazing off into the distance like a second-semester senior in American History. It’s bad. Life is happening without you.

Here’s the academic term: termination. Other names include senior slack, senioritis, slacking, lackadaisical sitting, time suckage, apathy.

Here’s what’s really happening: as a part of grieving, or processing the end (at least, perhaps we don’t really grieve things like the end of high school or leaving a job we hate…) of your current situation, you are carrying out iterations of The End in your head. This usually coincides with The Beginning of something else – possibly something more interesting, more exciting, more pleasing, or hopefully all three. So instead of thinking about all the things you might miss, you’re constructing, or dwelling on, things to look forward to.

We’ll take me for the moment. I could sit here, during my last 10.2 days of work, thinking about how much I’m going to miss my “Converts Rock” sign that hangs above my desk, or weeping over the pictures that the little girls at the mosque have drawn for me, or waving wistfully to Mr Bojangles (the mouse, shhhhh don’t tell the locals) every time he skitters by hoping to snatch a bit of my food. I could come teary-eyed to staff meetings and shed a single tear at every one of my remaining meetings and speaking engagements. I could bake for everyone. I could stay late soaking in the books at my desk. I mean, I could. In theory.

Here’s what I do instead: I Craigslist apartments in Washington, DC, and spend more time on gchat than any sane human should under normal circumstances. I drink too much coffee and probably don’t eat enough – or at least eat all of the wrong things. I don’t cook. I clean – perhaps out of a desire to have a somewhat ordered life to pack up – I let myself come into work at 11:30 and leave at 3. I daydream about tulips in DC, about the green, green summer, about having all the free time in the world, about all of the things that I want to do and have never done. I mentally catalog the people I want to spend my summer with and how I can make that happen, and the mellowest way of living at home at 27 and driving neither my parents nor myself insane. I try to calculate how many new shelves I will have to purchase in order to negotiate law school materials, and I wonder what proportion of my wardrobe can be carried over into the law classroom, the office, the court. I wonder about whether to keep my tiny, creaky bed or buy a newer, softer, bigger one. I try to put the novels I plan on reading this summer into some sort of order. I’m making a list of cities to visit, shows to see. I think of everything I could ever want a new city and a new life to provide; all the things I plan on leaving looooooooong behind in Boston; every work situation I will hope to avoid after leaving this desk. There is no end to these dreams. I dream them at work, in the car, walking, at night. Fantasy is creeping up on my reality, and slowly but surely, it is taking over.

This is what the inside of my mind looks like right now. I know, I wish I lived here too.

There are upsides. A lot of upsides. The chance to reinvent oneself – or at the very least, one’s life – doesn’t come every day. Life changes, these shifts – changes of job, location, a new school, a new path – these are precious things to be seized. How many people float through life never given a choice – never taking stock of what they have, and how it measures up against what they wanted, or what they want, what they dream about? There are a million chances to give up, to give in to stagnation, to let the tiny compromises of every single day eat up whatever it was we would have grabbed at instantly, at another time, another age, under slightly different circumstances.

Like, hmmm. Like what. Ok, like this shift that I’m negotiating for the next few months – that is, job-in-Boston-to-no-job-chilling-at-home-with-Mom&Dad-to-law-school-probably-but-not-definitely-in-DC. It’s all of a sudden real: I can cocoon myself in rural Massachusetts for the next few months and emerge the person I’ve wanted to be all along. Or I can squandor this time, oblivious to the future, throwing it to the wind, come what may. I can not think very hard about what I’m doing next and whether or not it will get me what I want in 5, 10, 15, 20 years – or I can remain very cognisant of the path ahead as I carve this smaller, more myopic one. I get to leave behind as much as I want – I get to completely reinvent myself, if I want to. It happens that I don’t want to. Not completely. But it’s nice to know that I could, and no one (well, maybe one person) in Washington would know that I haven’t been this way all along. I have what everyone in a mid-life crisis wants: Walk Away Insurance.

This is the most extreme, most expensive liability coverage one can purchase for a rental car. I have a lawyer-friend who made this up. It’s for extreme situations. Extreme needing-to-change-things situations. Basically you can leave the rental care behind you in an enormous ball of flames, walk away, and pay zero. You can walk away from everything and not look back. It’s cushy, that Walk Away Insurance. And I have it. And I’m trying to decide what to do with it.

Instead of working. Of course, it is 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, and it’s by far the most beautiful day of 2009 Boston has seen to date. So you know. Big thoughts. I can’t be confined to this office.

A good day to walk away.

So here’s to new beginnings, peeps. They’re worth a good toast and a daydream besides.

RIP Kurt Cobain

Hmmm, this is interesting. I am now the same age that Kurt Cobain was when he died, meaning, to my seventh-grade self, that I am now A Grown Up. He was married and had a kid called Frances and a wildly successful band and a talent for grunge and hanging from chandeliers, so, you know, he was way ahead of me in a lot of ways. I remember thinking that he was young and charming in that depressive, angsty, poetical way (so I have a thing). But I also remember thinking that he had an adult life and an adult existence – however muddled by riches, fame, a rockstar lifestyle and an ample supply of intoxicants. Still.

I am also the same age that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin were when they died. Janis had, like, a gravelly voice. A grown-up voice. A weathered voice. Again, I don’t think of either of them as old – these tragedies are particulary poignant because it seems that all of these people bid the world farewell at the height of their beauty, creativity, youth, and potential. But they were at the beginning of something, and that something was a proper adult life, a career, a long string of a story.

This is the beginning of my story: in our nation’s capital, the tulips and magnolias are blooming. I’m a few blocks from Capitol Hill, stealing Kevin’s seat next to Jane in Crim Law. I’m walking through a throng of Grateful Dead fans in Chinatown and watching my most favorite president drive by Jane’s apartment building with his entourage of guards. I’m drinking coffee in a cushy armchair at Tryst and learning where the good farmer’s markets are. I’m meeting Con Law professors who say things like, “You should come. We’ll, like, hang out and stuff.” I’m getting my drinks paid for and being stared at like a woman (instead of a zoo specimen). I’m being told that students interested in research and writing are sought after by their professors. And I can make it to Friday prayers at Capitol Hill.

But adults don’t make decisions based on stuff like that. They are rational. Whatever that means.

This is the first thing that happened: I walked into the building that houses the admissions office to go say hello and get the pitch (only fair to get all the pitches; a girl has to compare apples with apples). So I walk into the atrium and I’m looking for the elevator and my eyes happen – just happen – to fall upon a boy in skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, and pretty magnificent chops. And all I think is: I belong here.

But that is not how adults make decisions.

So I go up to admissions and meet the director and blah blah she’s telling me about the curriculum. She has a surprisingly weak pitch for someone supposed to woo, but no matter. I have already been wooed by Biker Boy downstairs. I call Jane.

[Jane and I lived roughly five doors apart our freshman year of college. We came to DC together to protest Bush's inauguration (last time I was here, actually...). We did a lot of theater together, and worked on building the college's chapter of Students for Tibet. I drank my first mojito with Jane.]

She walks over to where I’m sitting. Her hair is slightly longer; there is a handful of grey strands I can spot when I hug her. She is thinner than she was freshman year (aren’t we all). She’s in a grey sweater dress, black stockings, and exactly the kind of slouchy black boots i like. A colorful scarf is wound around her neck. Other than the five grey hairs and her sveltitude, she looks exactly the same. I’m amazed. I can’t help but wonder: will my reaction be the same if I see her in another ten years?

She is warm, totally open, as though I’m not wearing a scarf over my hair. Or I was wearing one the last time she saw me, instead of short hair and two piercings on my face. Or like there’s no difference. It doesn’t really matter – in any case, it’s nice to meet an old friend who doesn’t look, just for a second, like I’ve caught Plague. Her friends are similarly unwary and unphased, at least apparently. I feel like I can breathe, like I am taken for granted – or it is taken for granted that I belong here just as much as everyone else. I don’t feel like I need to defend myself at all. I don’t feel prickly. People feed me candy and eat my cake without asking. It’s fantastic, like finding childhood friends you never knew you had.

In the midst of a Crim Law lecture I receive an email from my dream, my first choice, my long shot: denied. Ah well. It still hurts a little, of course, some register somewhere that I am not, after all, a person who commands the admissions process; I am a person at its mercy. It could mean that I’m not as together or as smart or as accomplished as I’d like or as other people are, or it could mean none of these things. It just sucks not to be wanted – even when I’m not wanting back.

But adults take this in stride. They take a deep breath and listen to the fallout of Miranda, because they are here to learn, not to nurse a bruised ego.

And like an adult, like the older student I will be, God willing, I venture out from campus and seek out the cooler places in the city. In one of these I meet a man one of my best friends once wanted to set me up with, only to realize that he would, in fact, be a total disaster. Not because he’s bad. Just because he’s an F-sharp to my G. We don’t sound good together, we’re awkward to touch at the same time, it’s just bad all over. This too rolls off my back like so many drops of water, which feels good; it’s not some reawakened-and-lost dream, it’s just guy #3,287,394 I’m not that into. Who could be a friend.

All in all, it feels like I’m stepping out of a cage I didn’t even know I was in. Thank God.

I get back on a plane to a life that barely still exists. Destiny awaits, taking hold of my heart, pointing it south. I want to ask Kurt if this is a legitimate way of choosing a life: observing my heart’s compass, and setting out.

Lucyloo

I am not prepared for this. I walk in thinking that I will perform the mandatory coo and then walk out, serenely immutable. Life has other plans for me, as it usually does.

I’m an obvious baby-greeter: card, flowers for Mom; wrapped gift for Big Sis, and an unwrapped teddy bear for Baby are all somehow balanced in my arms as I ask for Maternity. I’m pointed down the hall: fourth floor.

And I open the door and there they are: my beautiful sister, alone again in her body, exhausted, holding something that is far too small to be a person. I’m surprised by how little she is, as I always am. She’s a good pound bigger than her sister was at 15 hours old, and that’s a lot when you weigh seven pounds. But she’s simply too tiny.

“Hey! Come meet Lucy,” my sister says in the slanted afternoon light.

I dump everything everywhere, descarf, unjacket, fling sunglasses and clamber onto the half-raised hospital bed. Lucy, meet Lizzy. My sister hands her over.

She weighs less than my cat by a long shot. She doesn’t frown, really, just barely squirms or adjusts for a second as she settles into my smaller arms. My sister doesn’t think she looks like anyone, but instantly I’m thinking that she reminds me of baby pictures of my sister that I’ve memorized. Her lips are like her sister’s. Her eyelashes, tucked up tight in her swollen newborn lids, are pale. Her eyebrows barely make a shadow on her forehead. One hand is peeking out the top of her cocooned blanket, the nails long and square and soft, never touched by anything. Each finger slowly curls around my pinky if I touch it to her palm, as though it’s automatic. Affection is easy, instinctive.

I was expecting to draw every analogy between Lucy’s arrival and the rest of ours, but sitting there on the bed, I don’t. I smell her, sweet, and it takes me about an hour to rack up the courage to kiss that flower-petal skin. I’m afraid I’ll break her.

Why are babies the easiest things in the world to love? I love her. She’s never spoken to me, or at this point even looked at me – I don’t even know what color her eyes are. She won’t know my name for months, maybe a year, maybe more if I go far away to school – and I love her. I forget myself with Lucy in my arms, and find myself thanking God after I hand her back to her mother that I don’t have kids yet.

She has a feel, which is more than the newborn feel, and I’ve either forgotten about this or I’m clueless because she’s really only the second baby I’ve ever met still in-hospital. Adalee was a showgirl even then; she was full of faces, smiles, she stared at us like she didn’t like how much we were staring at her. Lucy feels…calm, steady, and I realize that there’s a soul in this body, that she’s already a person with a fate and talents and interests. A person I don’t know yet. She’s so quiet and good-natured, so easy, so unassumingly accepting of all the caresses we are offering, so uncomplaining, that I imagine she will become the shy sister, the bookish one. At some point she opens her eyes and we all race to catch a glimpse, but she blinks quickly, as though the dim inside of the maternity ward is too much to take in, as though the world is overwhelming.

I am engulfed by a desire to take her and tuck her somewhere safe, where the world is slow and dark, and brightness can be negotiated in stages. Why? She has parents. She’s not my kid. There is a whole family, so many people we have here, to love her and cuddle her and make her feel like the specialest center of the world there ever was. It’s not my job. I don’t know why I feel so in love with her. Is it some parahormonal function of being a woman? Is this what I felt last time? I don’t think so; but memory is a funny thing. It moves to conform to the present.

And this child, this Lucyloo, in my arms, with almost-my name, she feels like tranquility in a blanket. I was once told that the reason we bond so swiftly and lovingly to some and just never feel as enthralled by others is that some souls were created nearer to each other. Souls that were close to each other in the beginning retain some cosmic affinity – they find each other here on earth and click, they are bonded to each other, they love each other unreasonably, they long for each other’s company. And others, they may be perfectly amiable or charming, perfectly beautiful or moral or interesting, but it’s like silk on silk – you just touch and slip off one another, taken by some other breeze. The Near Souls, you stick to them like velcro. One touch, and you’re going to have to rip yourself off. It doesn’t happen on its own.

I wonder how we tell this. Sometimes it becomes apparent later…short friendships that were too comfortable to explain, the only people we ever let hold our hands indefinitely, people who let us be ourselves before we even knew who that was. We look back on these marvels later, or those around us look in and say: bizarre. Sometimes, and this is hard, you realize it as it’s happening, a steeping of your heart in this new color that you know is going to stain. The moments are intoxicating, they are vibrant, you feel like something special is happening to you, that you’ve been selected for some extraordinary sensation that the rest of humanity cannot know or understand. It feels unreal, dizzying. This is what it’s like to hold this child, my niece. She feels like home.

What life lies in wait for her, this quiet one? Will life be kind to her, gentle, because hers is an embered glow? Prayers are pouring out of me as I watch her in the space between sleeping and waking. May this life be to you, Lucyloo, as extraordinary and pleasant as it was for me to meet you. Let me deposit you back in your tired mother’s arms. Visiting hours ended an hour ago. I have work tomorrow.

I’m unnecessarily worried, agitated, for the drive home. The city suddenly feels insignificant; 93 is in freefall. The apartment is quiet, the doors are shut, the kitchen light out.

Proof

There are three of us, and a fourth orange chair-plus-desk sits empty to our left. It’s life at the bottom of a well this next hour; we’re looking out at a modest mostly-if-not-totally Muslim audience. We’re here to tell our stories: the tall, white redheaded brother, the punkish hijabi in a ripped jean skirt and All-Stars, the blue-eyed first grade teacher in black abaya.

I never know what I’m going to say at these things. How many times have I told “my story”? Dozens? More than a hundred? It’s always slightly different. I don’t know why. Every time I omit something else, or leave out what feels like a whole pile of important details – and have some new thing that is central to the story. Today it turns out to be the story of Islam coming and finding me, and taking hold of my heart, and dragging me, kicking and screaming (partying and piercing?) into the world of Islam. I hear myself telling it as though it’s one unified string of events and nothing else belongs in the narrative. But you can’t lay out your life at the feet of strangers in a 15-minute span. A heart can’t fit in that space.

I’m the middle person in the panel. It goes like this: The Scientist (The Rational Surveyor of Tradition), The Reluctant Believer (The Dancer), The Born-Believer. So the ginger-haired boy who inspected every religious tradition for truth and Truth precedes me. I speak next, the free spirit who lived in the same house as a Muslim for almost a decade before she noticed that she belonged to the same religion, who would get drunk and declare that she needed God (though of course I omit this) and declare things along the lines of, “I will never become Muslim if Muslims can’t have dogs,” and ask things like, “But can I still dance?” I finish, disturbed by how moved I always become when I describe the choice I felt I was making when I became Muslim (in one hand, the world; in the other, a relationship with God….), make the sign of the horns and tell them, “Never look back, right?” They laugh. I’m glad they do. It puts my feet back on the ground.

Rock hard, Mozlems. Rock. Hard.

And then there is the girl after me. In a quiet voice, she describes a shy child who imagined sleeping in the hand of God and said the shahada for the first time at fifteen, stirring pasta sauce alone in a midwestern kitchen.

And that’s it: three converts. Three stories. Three souls in three safety nets, still swinging above the spikes of a purposeless existence, praying the net holds. And as we’re swinging in our orange chairs, before the enraptured faces of those born into a safer web built by generations of their forbears, I realize that we’re a proof of the very thing we hold dearest.

Because here we are: male and female, gregarious and introverted, tall and short; punk and put-together, bearded and hijabed, intuitive and intellectual. We are dancers and musicians and engineers; we are religion majors and science geeks; we are married and single; we are wild and we are tame; we are gentle and we are rough; we are soft and we are loud. And all three of us walked some winding road to here: in this classroom, at this university, in these chairs – the embracers of this religion, this Islam, this precious hot coal burning into our palms all the time that we will not let go. We’re all three here. For three different reasons, with a multitude of different struggles.

All three of us say the same thing: the story we’ve just told? It’s only the beginning.

Safe journeys, ye travelers!

Coming home, take 473

I’m sitting on a plane that left from Detroit at an indecent hour. Having left an immoderately bright morning behind us, we are descending into a dreary midday sky over Boston. I am crooking my neck over the two slumbering figures between me and the oval window, which is finally showing us the grey-navy bay water and some pentagonal memorial-looking stone structure. I blush, reminded yet again of what a horrible Bostonian I am. I don’t go to Red Sox games, I’ve never been to Walden Pond, and then there’s this new something that I have yet to visit and admire. We sink shakily, and I feel like my spine has wrapped it’s arms around my belly button and is squeezing. It’s the same thing I feel when I meet people whose books I have read wonderingly, the same thing I used to feel in junior high when a boy I wasn’t sure liked me looked at my lips. It is magnified on the plane, accompanied by my breathy la ilaha ila Allah’s. But the delightful-scary sensation isn’t caused only by the plane playing hopscotch on the wind. I’m excited to come home. Then I realize what I have just thought: home.

For years, maybe ever since high school, whenever I have come back to the place I am most rooted in at the moment, I have always thought about it like this: I’m going back to New York. I’m back in Amherst. I’m returning to Cairo. Everywhere, including Boston, has been the place that I happen to be living at the moment. I haven’t lived – that is, haven’t placed my bed – in any one room for more than nine months at a time since I was seventeen. That was nine years ago. Nothing has felt solid. It was all slipping through my fingers all the time, and this too might be slipping, but at the moment I’m ignoring that possibility. Suddenly, magically, Boston has become my home.

Few things can compare to the shivery thrill of the familiar. The beauty of this particular pleasure is so rare. New, bright and shiny things have an easy time fascinating us. But when you find yourself peculiarly enthralled by, say, your toaster, as opposed to the new iPhone sitting on your desk – that is a special moment.

Oh, how I love thee. Let me count the toasty mornings...

Now, I know that I have an unreasonable tendency to romanticize anything and everything that could possibly be construed as wholesome or New Englandy. Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Because what I want to say is this: what is familiar, known, comfortable already, the love of these types of things offers us a comfort incomparable to what is new and exciting.

This is what is easy: it is easy to fall in love with the new curve of a soft cheek, the sharp green smell of a new jacket, the inevitably surprising softness of a new hand. This is what is difficult: to hold hands for the 857th time and feel your heart jump a little, the priviledge of being beloved, and companionably touched, by this person still impossible to take for granted. To fall in love is no achievement. To stay in love? A feat of wonder.

You knew I was going to do that.

Of course, I’m as clueless as everyone else (except, apparently, our darling President and his lovely wife) when it comes to the actual realization of this feeling with another person. Generally, I am enamored more of the old than the new. I’m hoping this is a good start. But I’ve found myself changing, as well – where I used to think that I would never manage to be anything other than a die-hard country bumpkin, I find myself more and more unable to imagine living in Amherst again – or any place like it. I have started to enjoy the smallness of the city and its possibility, the thrill of meeting someone at my local cafe and then realizing as I walk home that we live on the same street. I find that there is something peculiarly enjoyable in having so much access to so much life by foot and bike, and in passing so many people on the street. I used to think that there was nothing I would trade for the pleasant, breezy solitude of an aimless country drive – but I find now that a stroll by the river or through residential streets with a friend is preferable.

It is not the promise of newness that the city offers me. The city is, in most ways, just as mundane as the country. We have routines just as those in the suburbs do. We have circles of people we are used to seeing, grocery stores we visit, the baristas that can greet us by name. I don’t attend every lecture or exhibit; I am not persistently aware that the next person walking through the door of my office could be someone I’ve never met before – I don’t live my days in anticipation.

What is it? Perhaps Boston has bred into me a love of rotaries and an endless supply of unnamed streets – or the Irish-y tendency to nickname places with the most endearing possible epithet: Southie, JP, Dot. As though the places are good childhood friends.

Maybe it was only a matter of time, and no matter where I had laid my head for most of the years since graduation it would have been the same. Perhaps I could have felt the same way about Cairo, or L.A., had I remained in either place. Perhaps it was a matter of knowledge and connectedness; I know more Boston history (what could be more charming than a whole sprawl of roads built on cow paths?) than any other place – excepting maybe Amherst. And then there is that so many of those I admire and wish to emulate have at least passed through this city: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Barack Obama, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri.

It could also be my stubbornness. It might be easy to love Florida, with her sunny promises, or L.A., because she flirts with fame – or even the slick, forward New York, all gaunt limbs and labels. But Boston, who has given us so many people that make us proud to be American, whose people do ridiculous things like throwing tea into the ocean and naming walls in ballparks ‘The Green Monstah,’ what of her? Maybe we could use some more street signs; perhaps we could do without a Bertucci’s or Cheesecake Factory here and there. Perhaps we’d have more good, old-fashioned summertime fun if we didn’t risk serious infection by dipping a toe into the Charles – but really, where’s the excitement in that?

I don’t need things to be so easy, so sunny, so sophisticated. The New Englander in me recoils a bit from these things – the moment I decided I couldn’t stay in L.A., I was watching a nipped-and-tucked woman draped in gold lamé and skin-tight everything shuffle into a hippie-vegan brunch spot in stilletos. On a Saturday. I don’t want to be that stylish – or primped – I just want to eat my organic tofu scramble in my jammies, thankyouverymuch. I mean, what are Saturday mornings for?

Seriously?...like, in the daytime?

Ultimately, I suppose, this feeling continues to be a mystery. And now that I am so close (less than five months – and counting) to maybe-leaving Boston, it feels more present – and more precious. What is it to be home? To love a thing?

Muppie takes the Fifth.

The Council of Strangers

The new convert to Islam has a lot of things to get used to. One of the most surprising is the council of strangers.

I find the concept of naseeha mysterious even now. The duty to advise one’s brothers and sisters regarding etiquette is not unique to the religion; the jarring piece is freedom with which people will do this.

Sometimes it is the point of a finger. A girl with uncovered hair walks through something that is perceived as “Muslim space” and a man across the room frowns, points at her, and then to his head. The message: Cover that. Sometimes a two-way conversation suddenly morphs into paternalistic sermonizing on the great traditions of Islam. “In Islam, you know, we know that God is greatest…” And sometimes it is meant well; the smallest of comments about your shoes, your dress, your presence, though coming from a place of sincere care, cuts deep. Makes you feel inadequate, unwelcome, embarrassed, angry – sometimes all at once.

 

  

I know that was meant well...but man I hope I never see that guy again!

 

I suppose that what I have always found mysterious is the lack of boundary when it comes to this. So many Muslims feel out of place, are searching for belonging – and yet we can’t resist the urge to nitpick each other’s behavior at every turn, creating the most alienating of environments out of what we are told on the mimbar is the most welcoming, egalitarian of communities. It is as though we are incapable of any other basis for interaction other than critique; there seems to be a lack of consideration as to whether or not the advice that slips so generously from our lips might be heard in the way it was intended. We think it is our duty to speak up; somehow we think it is not our duty to take care of each other first and foremost. 

 

Now I’m telling you this out of sisterly love! Appreciate my tyranny!

 

I have never gotten used to having to be prepared to be criticized about any aspect of my behavior or appearance by anyone at any time – but on occasion this is what it means to belong to this community. Is it a good thing? I wonder how many well-intentioned comments fall on deaf ears, ears reddened with anger or shame. I wonder how many people hopefully walk into a mosque, or an event, hoping to be met with open arms and instead confronting the disapproving glances of strangers or a series of suggestions on who else to be. Who has come to us on the promise of love and egalitarianism and been disappointed by our closed ranks, by our assumption that we know better, all the time? Who has been so shocked and embarrassed by being told where to pray, how to dress, how to wash, where to enter, that they’ve never come back?

A wise man once told me that the conditions for giving advice include that the giver thinks the listening party will be able to use the offered wisdom. So within the idea of giving advice there is the notion that advice is personal, and that is as it should be. Not every comment is appropriate for every audience at every time; ideally, we should be meeting people where they are at.

No one would think that it would be appropriate to point at an uncovered woman in distaste, and go merrily on your way, if you knew that woman had come to the mosque/musalla/event for the first time, timidly, not knowing what was right, with the intention to learn about Islam. She would be led to the most knowledgeable person in the room, catered to, served tea while she told surrounding Muslims her story, and asked her questions. This tricky thing we call our deen would not be shoved down her throat in one fell swoop; she would learn a little day by day in a supportive and welcoming environment. She would be loved; her progress would be praised, every step she took on her spiritual journey would be celebrated and held up as evidence of Islam’s success.

The problem is that every girl is that girl.

 

If only we knew.

 

 

May God guide us towards being better with each other; may He give us the strength to not take insult personally, and remain in the spaces we love and need despite callous and embarrassing treatment, ameen.

 

Something to talk about

I haven’t written, again, for a long time. It wasn’t that there was nothing to say. It was that everything I had to say was far too transparent and…well, not useful.

I have discovered, for instance, that it is extremely easy to write about love when one is not in love. As soon as that changes, writing about love on a blog starts to feel a lot like strolling through Grand Central Station in laundry day’s underwear. So I haven’t written about love.

I have also discovered that it is very easy to whine, complain, and muse endlessly about the Muslim community when one does not work for a Muslim nonprofit, and does not meet and greet the same Muslims in a predictable pattern. When I was a moonlighting cafe scenester, it was a mystery who I met or saw or interacted with. Nobody else but me knew how I spent my days. So it was easy to make a comment without 27 other people knowing exactly who I was talking trash about. Anonymity is a precious thing. So, I haven’t written about Muslims either.

So one broken heart and one very public job title later, I’m back. It’s fantastic news for my bank account,  less-than-thrilling news for my spent little feelings, and good news for my poor neglected blog.

And now I’m staring at my blinking cursor wondering just where to start.

To belong to you

Not all of us feel it. I didn’t feel it, and now I do: that fragile belonging to another person, or to a group of people, so unique and irreplaceable. It makes life bittersweet.

The first tastes I had of this were in college. Freshman year there is the inevitable grasping at straws; we arrive, a loosely connected group of teens eager to become the people they want to be, to discover who that is, to experience everything that was held off by parents or impossible in the tiny pool of high school. We banged hard against each other, trying to connect. Failing sometimes and succeeding in those brilliant, small moments that suggested we were coming to a new home.

Again, and more intensely, sophomore year, because I was a transfer student into a more elite school, one of only four entering midyear into a tightly-knit class just shy of four hundred. It was more of a struggle because everyone else had already found their hard-won niche in a freshman hallway or some corner of our one dining hall (which was severely segregated according to the unwritten rules of The Few Who Gained Admission Last Year). I bumbled through with a cigarette in one hand and a cheap beer in the other. Eventually a handful of others found me in my corner of the basement party, and I was again for a short time home.

And now it is the hardest, the most tenuous and precious. I forget that I am Other. I treat people as I always have. The smile is the same smile, the gesticulating hands are still mine. When I am greeted with reserve it takes me a moment to remember myself; I think the other person is plain rude until I remember that my dress is just this side of hinting at terrorism, oppression. I am a blazing flag of friendliness in garb that suggests to everyone else that I should be stern or shy or timid. I am none of those things. It might be perfectly intuitive to some and I’ll never know. But by now I know that it is not always a smooth ride between me and the stranger. They clue me in with a blank stare. And I miss being one of the inscrutable many.

There are a few people to whom I belong and will always belong. We may go our separate ways and I’ve been through enough goodbyes to know that most of us will. They will take with them a piece of me, they already have, and I will pray for good for them thereafter and hope that we are reunited in Gardens in which identity is no consideration.

I suppose that it is easy to forget, looking at a religion that seems so inescapably monolithic (we dress the same, we pray the same, we greet the same worldwide) that Muslims get lonely too. It’s not easy finding one’s social way in a community made up of every race, nationality, language and background. Some of us convince ourselves that belonging and being known are pipe dreams in this life, and we chase people for other reasons and make do and become happy. Others of us burn a hole in our hearts waiting to be understood by someone who seems too impossible to exist. Do we hold out? What more intimacy can we wrangle out of this life? When we find a place lacking, do we leave? How long a wait is it worth? These questions never leave, and that is our tragedy.

Most of us slice ourselves into pieces, and express our different longings to different people. When someone comes along who makes us feel whole again, it is shocking. We disbelieve our own hearts. With time it sinks in and then it is even more terrible than before: you cannot lose a fantasy, but you can certainly lose a person. But what you have, what you’ve been waiting for, when it is in front of you? There are only two options. You hold on for dear life, and pray to God that it never ends, or you walk away and don’t give yourself anything to grieve.

It’s either bittersweet or bitter. Take your medicine.